The final tier of the New Mirgorod Hotel rose dizzyingly high behind her, casting a deep shadow all the way to the parapet. There was a risk of being seen from one of those upper windows, but she’d checked the angles when she scouted the location. The danger was only when she crossed the roof. Once she was in firing position the hut-like lift mechanism housing would hide her, as long as she kept low.
The roof crossing was only half a dozen paces. Crossings were always a risk, and there was no point in waiting. Elena Cornelius picked up her bag and went. In the cover of the lift housing she crouched low. Knelt. Lay flat, stomach to the ground, face inches from the mix of rough gravel and tar that coated the roof. The waist-high parapet was five yards in front of her.
During the siege she had crawled on her belly every day. Now she crawled again, hauling herself, knees and elbows and belly across the rough surface, dragging the canvas bag, until she was in the shelter of the parapet. Then she moved right until she was tucked in under the plinth of the bronze statue in the corner.
The statue was a woman in military uniform facing out across the city, a rifle held at an angle across her breast. Above her huge bronze military boots her calves swelled, shapely and muscular. Elena scrabbled into a sitting position and pressed her back against the parapet wall. She was in a safe high place, a vantage point to hide and watch from and not be seen. She knew how to do this. It was familiar. It was a kind of home. She didn’t think about why she was there, what had led her to this point. All the decisions were already taken. When you were at work, you worked. That was how you survived.
She unwrapped the Zhodarev rifle, checked the magazine and banged it into position with the heel of her hand. Found the telescopic sight at the bottom of the bag, polished the optics with her sleeve and pushed it onto the rail, easing it forward until it clicked solidly. Then she folded the faded pink towel with the lemon-yellow tractors into a thick sausage, reached up and laid it on the parapet for a barrel rest. Raising herself into a kneeling position, she propped her left elbow on her left knee and raised the rifle, made sure the barrel sat good and solid on its towel rest, settled the stock into her shoulder, pressed her eye to the scope and adjusted the focus.
The VIP viewing platform jumped into view, crisp and clear, down and to the left of her firing position. Tiers of empty seats. They hadn’t started to arrive yet.
It was a long shot. She could have done with a more powerful scope, but she didn’t have one. She checked the adjustment of the graticule. It was unchanged from how she’d set it that morning before she left home. The range was six hundred and fifty yards–she’d paced it out a week ago plus some simple geometry to allow for height.
The warm morning air rested gently against her cheek. Windage, zero.
Nothing to do but wait and watch.
4
Lom had lost sight of Elena Cornelius at the top of Noviy Prospect just before it opened into Victory Square. He tried to find her again, but it was hopeless: there were any number of alleys and doorways she might have taken, or she could have switched direction and ducked past him back down the avenue against the flow of people without him seeing. He hesitated. Considered abandoning looking for her. After all, it was possible he was wrong about what she was doing. Maybe she’d just come to see the parade.
But he didn’t believe that.
He made his way out onto the fringe of Victory Square. The open space, laid out on what had once been the much smaller Square of the Piteous Angel, was staggeringly vast. Block after block of streets and buildings (Lom remembered them) had been demolished to make room for it. Rivers and canals had been covered over, the city completely reoriented. And now it was completely filled with people come for the Victory Parade. It was impossible to estimate how many were there: half a million? A million? There were high terraces for seating, and crowds of people standing shoulder to shoulder in the gaps between. He could see across to the raised platform where Rizhin would take his place. The VIP seats were beginning to fill up.
Not far from the platform the Lodka still stood, the dark and many-roofed headquarters of the old Vlast, no longer on an island between river and canal, occupying one small corner of the square. The Lodka had survived siege bombardment and aerial bombing raids, but now–eviscerated when Chazia removed the great archives and burned most of the contents, overtopped by the surrounding sky rises of concrete and granite and glass with their wedding-cake encrustations and monumental bas-reliefs–the huge cliff of a building looked isolated and diminished. Smartened-up but mothballed. A museum piece.
And next to the Lodka, dwarfing it, climbing higher–far higher–than any other building in the city, rising tier upon tier of stark grey stone, fluted, slender and almost weightless against the sky, was the Rizhin Tower, which was to be formally declared open that day. The top of the tower, constituting one tenth of the total height of the building, was an immense and gunmetal-grey statue of Papa Rizhin. He was in civilian clothes, standing bare-headed, his long coat lifting behind him slightly in a suggestion of wind. He was stepping forward towards the city, his back to the sea, his right arm raised and outstretched to greet and possess. The statue’s civilian clothing puzzled Lom. Not the military tunic and shoulder boards of the standard Rizhin portrait, it struck an odd note.
Then the truth struck him. This dizzying and mighty behemoth was not a statue of Rizhin at all; it was a statue of Josef Kantor. Kantor the agitator, the plotter, the revolutionary orator, the killer, the master terrorist.
Josef Kantor had transformed himself into Papa Rizhin at the siege of Mirgorod. He kept his origins secret, hidden, suppressed. All hints of his former self were ruthlessly obliterated. But here in Victory Square in the heart of Mirgorod–in plain sight, in the most visible, most spectacular place of all, full in the face of the whole of the Vlast–Rizhin thrust the truth of himself at them all, and nobody could see it, or if they did they dared not say. The Rizhin Tower was an act of the most astonishing hubris: a challenge, a yell, a dare, a spit in the eye of the world.
At that moment a strange noise started to swell and grow in Victory Square. Lom had heard nothing like it before. It began as a low clatter and hum and grew to a great roaring, deafening buzz. It was the sound of the crowd rising to greet the arrival of Papa Rizhin, who had stepped out onto the raised platform. It wasn’t cheering. It was a vibration of excitement like the agitation of a billion bees. The extraordinary noise reverberated around the square and echoed, magnified, off the surrounding buildings.
Lom turned his back on it. He shoved and threaded his way back into Noviy Prospect, which was almost deserted now, its flags and banners and portraits of Rizhin stirring in a gentle rising breeze. Everyone who was going to Victory Square had found their place; the parades and speeches were about to begin. But where was Elena Cornelius?
5
Eligiya Kamilova walks once more the five level miles, the long straight stony road south out of Belatinsk and back to Nikolai Forshin’s dacha. The dacha of the Philosophy League. Keeping her eyes down, no longer even consciously hungry, she walks with slow and fierce determination. One step. One step. One step. All her attention is fixed on her dust-yellowed boots and the pale stalks that are her shins.